Saturday, September 10, 2016

Liberty in Law: A Matter of Man's Law, not God's Law

By Rudy Barnes, Jr.

The
fundamental rights of individual freedom, or liberty in law, are a matter of man’s law, not God’s law; and freedom
is at the heart of religious conflict today.Islam grew out of Judaism, and there are many similarities in their holy
scriptures.Both the Hebrew Bible and
the Qur’an emphasize obedience to God’s laws, and the laws themselves are quite
similar, reflecting their common Semitic heritage.But the holy books do not mention individual freedom.

Jesus
was a Jew who emphasized love over
law as God’s standard of righteousness.
That enabled Christianity to embrace those concepts of liberty in law that
originated in the Enlightenment and were grounded in secular natural law rather
than ancient holy laws. The human rights
that protect our liberty in law are consistent with the teachings of Jesus as summarized
in the greatest commandment to love
God and our neighbors as we love ourselves, and that is considered a common word of faith for Jews,
Christians and Muslims alike.

Political Islam, or
Islamism, is prevalent in Islamic cultures today. It represents the political
sovereignty of God over man and demands submission to Islamic law, or shari’a,
which denies the fundamental freedoms of religion and speech with apostasy and
blasphemy laws. Until the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty
Years War in 1648, the Christian world also denied liberty in law and enforced
blasphemy laws with the divine right to rule.

In the 17th century the
political sovereignty of God in the Western world was superseded by the concept
of secular sovereignty and international law introduced by Hugo Grotius in his On
the Law of War and Peace (1625). Those
revolutionary innovations paved the way for the libertarian ideals of the
Enlightenment that included the social contract theory of democracy and a secular
rule of law that emphasized human rights.

Recognizing
the political sovereignty of man over God does not deny the ultimate sovereignty
of God—only the enforcement of God’s law.
For there to be liberty in law religious standards of legitimacy must be
considered voluntary moral standards rather than obligatory standards of law that
are enforced by government. Fundamentalist
religions that impose their religious laws on others deny liberty in law.

Today
libertarian democracies emphasize human rights that begin with the freedoms of
religion and speech while Islamist nations deny those fundamental freedoms with
shari’a. But in America the freedom of
religion has been distorted by fundamentalist Christians who claim their
freedom of religion allows them to violate laws that conflict with their
beliefs, and have used religious freedom to fan the flames of religious hatred.
Liberty in law reveals the moral quality
of a nation’s religion, and in the U.S. it has often revealed human depravity and
decadence.

In
domestic U.S. politics liberty in law has emphasized individual rights and
wants to the detriment of providing for the common good, and in a healthy
democracy there must be a balance between the two. The lust for power, greed and disengenuity have
come to characterize our politics, so that it is little wonder that Muslims are
not impressed with libertarian democracy.

The
enforcement of apostasy and blasphemy laws in Islamist regimes reflects a
coercive and often hypocritical picture of moral purity. It also fosters violence since radical
Islamist terrorists could not survive if Muslims were free to change their
religion and criticize fundamentalist forms of Islamism. That makes promoting liberty in law in
Islamic nations, beginning with the freedoms of religion and speech, a matter
of national security; and the first sign of progress will be the elimination of
apostasy and blasphemy laws.

Islam
is expected to surpass Christianity as the world’s largest religion by the end
of the century. But even if democracy
remains the preferred form of governance, submission to God’s law is likely to
prevail in Islamic cultures. Egypt and
Pakistan are examples of what Islamic democracy is likely to look like in the
future. Both are U.S. allies that
receive U.S. aid, but both continue to deny the freedoms of religion and speech
with apostasy and blasphemy laws.

This
presents a daunting challenge for religious leaders who favor libertarian
democracy over oppressive theocracy. E.
J. Dionne, Jr. has asked, In todays’
troubling times, where are our faith leaders? Dionne believes that
“religion has been subsumed by politics,” and considered by liberals in the
U.S. to be “on the right end of politics;” and that because the media focuses
on the most extreme examples of religion, the more moderate forms of religion
are largely ignored.

Religion
can restore a sense of morality to politics so long as religious
fundamentalists do not impose their sacred standards of legitimacy to deny our liberty
in law.We need to remember the greatest commandment to love God and
our neighbors as ourselves—including those of other religions.The question is which paradigm of religion
and politics best represents our love for our neighbors—that of individual
freedom or submission to oppressive religious laws?The answer is as self-evident as the
inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Notes
and references:

Liberty
in law
is from America the Beautiful (words
by Katherine Lee Bates, 1904):

On the contrast between human
rights in libertarian democracies of the West and Islamic regimes in the East
under shari’a, and the contrasting views of Islamic scholars on that topic, see
Religion,Legitimacy and the Law: Shari’a, Democracy and Human Rights (pp 6-17)
at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4qPfb4MvEswV2ZHS3hyWTcwbmc/view.

On the need to balance individual
rights with providing for the common good, see